Drinking Liberally — Seattle

The Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally is “on tour,” searching for a new meeting location. The folks who showed up last week agreed to a list of places to try for the next month. We’ll visit a new place each week.

Can’t make it tonight? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters also meet on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, the Bellingham and Burien chapters meet. And on Thursday, the Woodinville chapter meets.

With 213 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting near you.

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Is Montlake Ale House kaput? Did they raise the cover charge? Did you get run out by a rightwing militia from Laurelhurst? Did the bus service on E. 23rd fold for lack of funding? Did metal thieves steal the bike rack out front? What’s going on? Montlake was fine for years.

Explain to me the Christian concept of forgiveness. I think Christ demands it of you according to the Devine word of your holy book. But then you seem like many Christian I know.

“Pious, declare your faith in public never mind John 6.6, go to services. Wait, I’m supposed to live by this bible? Oh well, I’m a better Christian than you, for I go to church. I have no forgiveness and I don’t care that Christ warns as far as forgiveness for I am saved if I follow the parts I like.” Piddles, or words to that effect.

Former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia has been indicted. Jim and his wife have been charged with bribery, stemming from gifts from a friend and contributor, who had business with the Commonwealth of Virginia.http://mobile.reuters.com/arti.....1?irpc=932

Turns out there is a third GOP Governor elected in 2009, that was also embroiled in a scandal. The Governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Benigno Fitial, and was impeached last year.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benigno_Fitial

Every time a rightwing nutjob starts frothing at the mouth complaining bitterly that conservatives should be able to say or do any thing they want without any consequence to them, demand that they also have to support the free speech rights of Jane Fonda, that she should have been able to say or do what ever she wanted, without consequences.

One of the reasons why Hanoi Jane was never indicted was because we were not at War with North Vietnam. It was a UN “Police Action” and no war was declared by Congress, therefore there was no legal basis to prosecute her. If she would have been prosecuted, that would have opened up the US to investigations of war crimes, by the laws that existed as written by the United States.

We butchered nearly 3 million Vietnamese, 2/3 of them civilians, on a political principle and to take the country for BF Goodrich who claimed ownership of nearly 12 million acres of land in Vietnam. Ngô Đình Diệm was assassinated by the CIA after he’d started talking about opposing those claims and returning the lands to the Vietnamese. It was exactly the same rationale as what happened in Chile in 1973. It just didn’t go the same way.

Here’s a bone that puddibigot has gnawed on a bunch – divorce in the hyper-“religious” parts of the country, seems there are scientists on the case…

In a new study titled “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates,” which will be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology, demographer and University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Glass set out to discover why divorce rates would be higher in religious states…

What did they find? Was it the conventional explanation that evangelical religions are popular where there is lots of poverty, and hence general social instability? No, in fact…

putting pressure on young people to marry sooner, frowning upon cohabitation before marriage, teaching abstinence-only sex education and making access to resources like emergency contraception more difficult all result in earlier childbearing ages and less-solid marriages from the get-go

I’m sure the puddibigot will be along to inform us that it’s really all the fault of all those Democratic mayors throughout Dixie.

If the RETHUGS think that minimum wage is such a good salary, then we should impose that on the REICH THINKING RETHUGS. And their saved up wealth should be reduced to match their new found financial reality. And no public dole for them either.

@21 In this country, any nutjob with no credentials can run for any public office, as long as he has a birth certificate and walks erect on two hind legs. No mental ability need be demonstrated. In fact, in some jurisdictions, an ability to think is considered by many voters to be a disqualification.

The legal hearing taking place this week in Sumter, S.C., is noteworthy for the social divide it’s exposing — blacks on one side, whites on the other.

It was the whites who held sway back in 1944 when a white-run court system and an all-white jury put a 14-year-old black boy to death on the strength of nothing more than an alleged confession extracted from him by white police officers.

There’s no question that two young white girls were dead, or that someone killed them, by whacking their heads with a railroad spike. It can’t even be ruled out that the 14-year-old black kid did it, which is to say his innocence can’t be proved, because most of the case record and evidence has been lost or destroyed, and all of the key players in his sham trial are dead.

But the judge said at the outset that this week’s hearing to reopen the case isn’t about George Stinney Jr.’s guilt or innocence, it’s about whether he received a fair trial. And the conclusion is foregone, because to ask that question is to answer it.

Stinney’s appointed counsel, a local politician running for office, put on no defense whatsoever. He didn’t even question the cops to whom Stinney allegedly confessed. (Suggested question: “Did you beat him up?”)

The “trial” lasted only 3 hours. The jury deliberated only 10 minutes. In the South Carolina of 1944, white folks didn’t think twice about taking a human being’s life from him with a process like that, even if he was only 14 years old — if he was black.

Stinney received no support, moral or otherwise, from his family. They weren’t around. Before his trial began, they were run out of town by death threats. If you were a black family living in a small town in South Carolina in the 1940s and white folks told you they would kill you if you didn’t leave town, you took it seriously — because they meant it and would do it.

There’s no doubt the murders of those two girls scarred that little community. Some of the scars remain today. But even relatives of murder victims have an interest in the right person being caught and punished, because if the wrong person is punished, that means the perp is still out there and still a threat to others in the community.

Some have speculated the victims’ families knew who the “real killer” was but kept quiet, insinuating he was some prominent local white person. It has even been suggested the girls’ parents took hush money to keep quiet, which the victims’ surviving relatives angrily deny.

That’s beside the point. The problem is South Carolina’s legal system put a kid to death with nothing more than the flimsy pretense of due process that George Stinney received.

This week’s court hearing on a motion by lawyers arguing on Stinney’s behalf to reopen his case can’t give him his life back, but it can give him his postmortem reputation back. It can advance human rights by ruling that the “southern justice” of 1944 was wrong and right it by vacating Stinney’s conviction. That, of course, effectively declares his execution was a judicial lynching, because there’s no way to retry him and vacating his conviction will be tantamount to a legal exoneration.

The murdered girls’ sisters are bitterly opposed to the idea. They want everyone to “let it rest.” They convicted George Stinney in their own minds a lifetime ago, and their minds are closed to reason, justice, or the argument that Stinney was blamed for the deaths of their sisters by a flawed process — and by a deeply prejudiced society.

The people involved in this case aren’t deep thinkers. They’re the relatively uneducated members of a blue-collar community who don’t give much thought to idealistic or intellectual things. Two children were murdered, a suspect was convicted and executed, and as far as they’re concerned that’s the end of it. You can sort of understand their position from their point of view.

But they can’t be allowed to get away with it.

Even though George Stinney has been dead for 70 years, and no legal proceeding can bring him back, it is not George Stinney but “southern justice” that’s on trial this week; and the “southern justice” of the Jim Crow-era that railroaded countless blacks into the brutal southern prisons of that era, and no small number of them into the KKK South’s death chambers, should not get a free pass any more than surviving Nazi criminals should get a free pass simply because many years have passed and it’s old history now.

The judge’s ruling should simply say, “This wasn’t due process. No conviction obtained under process like this can stand.” That’s all she needs to say. Those words speak for themselves. Whether Stinney was innocent or guilty is beside the point. It is southern racism that’s on trial in Sumter, S.C. It is the question of whether racists can render a lynching legal and reputable by shoving it through a sham pretense of a judicial proceeding that’s on trial.

And that’s why Sumter’s small courthouse has been packed with people this week and national and international news media are covering this legal proceeding.

Every time a rightwing nutjob starts frothing at the mouth complaining bitterly that conservatives should be able to say or do any thing they want without any consequence to them, demand that they also have to support the free speech rights of Jane Fonda, that she should have been able to say or do what ever she wanted, without consequences.

And you libtard DUMMOCRETINS scream all the time when conservatives make y’all look stooooooooooopid. Witness Guvnur Cuomo claiming conservatives need not live in NY.

Yeah right Fascist Pigsty… Once again not paying attention to anything worthwhile!

I was saving this one for after the MAC Title game, so it’s a little late. In San Francisco, the Peninsula Commute train, now known as CalTrain, turned 150 this year. It is the oldest commuter train,or as Southern Pacific called it, commute train, on the west coast. SOUNDER is almost 15.http://www.caltrain.com/about/Caltrain150.html

In Los Angeles, the LACMTA has started construction of the Crenshaw line. This will be a North South line from the Green Line terminus in Redondo Beach, passing LAX, and continuing on to a connection with the just opened Expo line. It should provide some relief to the bBue line.http://www.railwayage.com/inde.....channel=61

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